


Lasting Influence

by orphan_account



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Fem!Javert - Freeform, Female Friendship, Gen, Valvert Gift Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-10 06:28:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	Lasting Influence

  
Another village full of vicious gossip and unfriendly eyes disappears behind them one dusty step at a time. The Javert family has been forcefully evicted from enough dwellings by now to scent approaching trouble like a thunderstorm and head for new shelter before the lightning strikes. By leaving now, and not waiting for a formal invitation to get out, they save themselves from the hands of angry neighbours. That is all there is to it. They've made no friends in their brief stay, none of them will miss or be missed by this comfortable little community.   
  
The girl Javert lags behind her parents, weighted down by the heavy bundle slung over her shoulders, her eyes fixed resolutely on the dusty road so she won't have to see her mother's bowed head or the brooding anger in her father's face. She knows the sight of their defeat too well, and the part of her heart that it once scraped raw and bloody has grown calloused over the years. They brought it on themselves.   
  
She holds her tongue through every town left behind, every employer who learns that her father was in the galleys and dismisses her, the sneers and gawking from the wholesome town girls when they find out that her mother served time in prison for card-reading. Often neither of her parents can get work in a town after presenting their papers to the authorities, and whatever she can earn is all the three of them have to live on. Their shame is like a poisonous miasma choking her every moment she spends with them; the days spent labouring in field or factory without them near feel like relief.   
  
Her mother says weakly that things will surely be better in the next town along the road, but the girl Javert sees no reason why Faverolles should be different from any of the inhospitable villages already left behind.  
  
  
  
===  
  
  
  
It is autumn in Faverolles and the orchard trees are heavy with fruit. The smell of apples ripening under the hot sun wafts lazily out over the lane and neighbouring hay fields on a gasp of air so heavy it seems to drag at weary limbs. The sun sinks beyond the western hills in a furnace of red and orange rays that slyly hint at a continuation of this good, clear weather to dry the hay and put a final blush the fruit before harvest. By tomorrow the fickle skies may have decided instead to pour rain, but Jeanne Valjean sees no need to borrow trouble with imagining the worst. A full day's work finished and a handful of sous to take home to Jeannette and the children, she doesn't ask for more.   
  
In the little creek that runs parallel to the road, she pauses to splash water on her flushed and sweating face, and to shake hay seeds and chaff from the curly mop of her hair. It doesn't go amiss on her face but her hair is as unmanageable as ever, strands of grass sticking here and there, the tail she knotted it into when she arose in the morning all but unwound.   
  
"It wants combing," the new girl says blandly, stepping into the water a few paces downstream to scoop handfuls of water onto her head. She hasn't been in Faverolles long enough for a woman as incurious as Jeanne to be able to put a name to the face.  
  
"I have no comb," Jeanne mutters. Twilight has fallen, darkness near on its heels, and she thinks only of getting home to a bit of soup and the straw bed she shares with Jeannette and the seven children.   
  
"Your fingers will do. Good night."   
  
The girl slips away into the gloom without waiting for a response. Jeanne wipes herself off and continues down the lane toward home.   
  
\--  
  
It is Jeannette who discovers the girl's name, as she discovers most things in time. A woman with seven children to raise has little opportunity for idle gossip but Jeannette asserts, with a meaningful arch of her brows at her sister, that it often does good to pay attention when others are indulging.   
  
The girl is called Mademoiselle Javert, come up from a southern port city and somewhat mysterious. She is scrupulously honest, a hard worker but taciturn - which Jeanne already knows, having worked with her for a week in the orchards and accomplished a great deal in comfortable, mutual silence. What interests the busybodies is that she doesn't rent living quarters in Faverolles, instead seeming to vanish after working hours into the trees skirting town, only to reappear with the sun at dawn. That no one has yet followed her to see where she goes speaks highly either of their restraint or of their exhaustion at the end of the day. If Jeanne cared to guess, she would say the latter.   
  
\--  
  
She sees a lot of Javert in the weeks that follow. They take many of the same jobs and each can trust that the other will pull her weight and more when the sun blazes down on the orchards and the other harvesters sit down to have a breather. Neither is much of a talker - although Javert proves capable of story-telling when nagged by the others for tales of travel, she seems most content to be left in silence to earn her pay.   
  
It's near the end of the apple picking season when Jeanne breaks her wrist falling out of a tree. An old, brittle branch that she should have known better than to trust under her feet gives way with a rending crack, giving her barely time for a moment's terror, a memory of her father's death in a similar fall, and then she's in empty air, falling, falling. She is lying stunned on her stomach at the foot of the tree when Javert slides down and kneels by her side.   
  
The injury itself is later a fuzzy memory but Jeanne remembers well the quiet voice telling her that the break is clean and needs only setting. A burst of awful pain and then fingers stroking her hair back from her cheeks with an oddly clumsy gentleness, her head pillowed on a narrow lap that smells of tree bark and apples. No one except her sister and her long-since departed mother have ever in her lifetime bothered to touch her with such care. Jeanne doesn't forget.   
  
\--  
  
All the fruit is gathered, the fodder for the animals raked and piled and now at last all stored away for the winter. Just in time, if the clouds churning restlessly overhead are as wet as they appear. The first snow of the season, perhaps. It may well be cold enough for snow.   
  
Jeanne shakes herself off and stands shivering on the creek bank, watching Javert wade in to wash just like she always did in the autumn, before the water turned icy. She ladles the water up in her cupped hands to pour over her head, another scoop over her face, and then a brisk scrubbing with wet hands at her arms and down her back and neck. Ripples of gooseflesh appear in the wake of the scrubbing. Her wet hair sticks to her head in a smooth, dripping hood that turns her face into something round and unfamiliar.   
  
Surprising herself, Jeanne breaks the usual silence between them. "Your hair wants combing."   
  
"Yes."   
  
"Let me."   
  
Javert doesn't immediately reply. She finishes her bathing and steps out on the bank near Jeanne to wring the excess moisture from her hair and clothing as best she can with two cold-numbed hands. Her fingers are chapped and peeling from the dual stresses of hard labour and the wildly fluctuating temperatures of the past days.   
  
"You owe me nothing for my help with your wrist," she says finally. "In truth, I owe you an apology for allowing you to think me kind. I have lied to everyone in this town since the day I arrived. Do not think I deserve gratitude."   
  
"Lied?" Jeanne echoes in confusion.  
  
"My parents are law-breakers. They thought that by concealing my connection to them I might be able to earn a living for us here, so I told no one. It is a lie of omission, but no less a lie for that."     
  
The girl's stiff posture seems to indicate shame in the thing she's confessing but for a long moment Jeanne can feel no particular shock. The confession itself is the most startling part. Petty criminals come and go, and no one who knows of their crimes wants to hire them or any associated with them. In that position, naturally one would lie.   
  
"What sort of law-breakers?" she asks.   
  
"My father was a thief, my mother told fortunes."   
  
Jeanne considers this new information in light of the girl standing braced before her as if expecting a blow. A scrupulously honest girl who has just admitted a truth that Jeanne might easily spread about town and get Javert driven out. A girl whose quiet company she enjoys, and to whom she feels grateful.   
  
"I will tell no one if you don't," she says. "Your hair still wants combing."   
  
\--  
  
Javert tells no one else of her family, but she begins to speak more freely when alone with Jeanne. The truth rolls far more easily from her tongue than the sterile half-truths she was bound to speak before, and though Jeanne makes a poor conversationalist she is an attentive listener.   
  
The first snow falls. Work is scarce now but their need for it is all the more acute. Sometimes they apply for the same job; sometimes Javert withdraws her application, saying dryly that Jeanne has more mouths to feed and less creativity to do it with. Jeanne acknowledges the truth in this, but still wonders at times how Javert's family is faring in their harsh, northern conditions. Javert rarely mentions them.   
  
"Will you move on again when the spring comes?" Jeanne asks one day as they work together to shift a snowbank that is piled high across the road.   
  
"That is not for me to decide," replies Javert. "There have been other towns where I might have stayed, had I been allowed. But I think, Valjean... if nothing comes to stop it... that I would be glad to stay in Faverolles."   
  
  
  
===  
  
  
  
Mid-winter, someone finally follows Javert and learns where she goes after dark. The whole town seems to know already by the next morning, their disapproving eyes and whispers following her steps to her place of work where she is promptly dismissed and ordered off the property.   
  
She understands from the moment she enters town that her time here is at an end. The angry words are confirmation, not revelation. How many times has she walked to work in the morning and sensed this uneasy electricity in the wind, storm winds blowing she and her father and her mother out onto the road once again? At least this time she has a few sous saved in reserve for the journey ahead. But there is also an unfamiliar regret at the thought of leaving that pricks at her as she informs her parents of the situation and helps to pack the family belongings.   
It doesn't take long to pack everything up. They have too few belongings and too much experience to let it drag on, and the three of them are ready to be on the road by the time the sun has fully risen over the horizon.   
  
"Go on without me," she tells her parents, overriding the alarm on her mother's face with the assurance, "I'll catch up to you in a while."   
  
Her father doesn't hesitate. Her mother forces a smile and tells her to be careful and hurry. Neither one of them can meet her eyes this morning, any more than they could on the morning they had to leave the last town or the one before that or the one before that. It doesn't hurt her anymore.   
  
She finds Jeanne with three other labourers on the edge of Faverolles, breaking up a big, old tree that the wind has brought down right across someone's fence. A tense hush falls when they see her. Jeanne pauses with her axe stuck fast in the tree trunk, her eyes squinted against the whipping of her unruly hair in her face.   
  
If Javert had her preference this would be private between her and Jeanne, but things are what they are. To appear too friendly now that the truth has come out into the open would only harm Jeanne's reputation and ability to provide for her sister and nieces and nephews.   
  
So instead of speaking her gratitude or the helpless wishing in her heart that things could be different - that she could be someone different - Javert folds her arms stiffly over her chest and nods to Jeanne. "My parents and I are leaving Faverolles this morning. I suppose you will have guessed that by now, but I thought I should remind you that M'sieur Fournier will want someone to take my place unloading that grain, and you know he would be pleased to hire you on. That is all. Goodbye, Valjean."   
  
Jeanne is smart enough not to react beyond the strained twist of her mouth, a curt nod of acknowledgement and a muttered, "Goodbye," and the image Javert takes away from this last meeting is of an almost typical Jeanne.  
  
Perhaps, Javert thinks later as she walks beside her mother, perhaps it is all for the best that she is leaving. Jeanne and her family could only suffer from association with a lying daughter of criminals. At a distance Javert will have no influence but to wish them well, and she resolves to do so with all her heart.  
  
It is the winter of 1794, a pale sun climbing high overhead, and behind the three walkers Faverolles disappears into the distance.   
  
  



End file.
